You can’t beat one of QPR’s reactionary, wide ranging, ranty statements and Saturday’s effort was an absolute cracker. So where do we stand now? LFW tries some second guessing.
Nobody does a long-winded, nonsense-laced official statement quite as well as Queens Park Rangers. I think my favourite of recent times was the one where Gianni Paladini said people had threatened to kill him for daring to arrange a friendly with MK Dons. One can only imagine how the plea and directions hearing for that one would have gone had somebody followed through with their promise on that occasion. “I just really hate MK Dons your honour.” Hardly likely is it?
Anyway, let’s have a quick look at the latest effort shall we…
“We are pleased to confirm that Adel Taarabt will be staying at QPR this summer. Despite receiving a substantial bid for our Moroccan international, we rebuffed all approaches and indeed, we are keen to build for the future in the Barclays Premier League, and not sell one of our prized assets. Should we have decided to sell Taarabt this summer, we made it clear to Neil Warnock that we would reinvest funds into the squad. Taarabt is fully committed to the club and is looking forward to proving his undoubted star quality for QPR in the Barclays Premier League. Our decision not to sell him only serves to reiterate the ambition and commitment we have both shown to QPR since we arrived here.
We saved the club when it was close to relegation from the Championship and just one week from liquidation. At this time, Flavio Briatore outlined a four year plan to reach the Premier League, which was achieved. We have always owned approximately 70 per-cent of the shareholding at the club and have been the major benefactors since our arrival.
We have backed Neil Warnock in bringing in his two top targets, Jay Bothroyd and Kieron Dyer, and we are working hard to try and pursue a couple of other targets the coach has identified. Welsh international Danny Gabbidon has impressed the coach whilst on trial and we are aiming to add him, as well as at least one or two other players to our squad in the near future.
Neil Warnock is our coach and we are working closely with him in a professional and confidential manner to try to achieve our aims and objectives. The coach's job is to coach the squad and identify players he believes will improve the squad. As a board, we deal with all the negotiations and we have been successful in completing deals for Bothroyd and Dyer so far. We are aware of some issues that have been raised in the press by the coach, but we have discussed these with him internally and he has agreed to be more reserved in terms of what he discusses in the future.
We are fully committed to strengthening our status as a Premier League Club next season and in due course, build for the future. Now we are in the Premier League, we intend to stay here. We believe this club can achieve great things and we are looking forward to the Barclays Premier League season.
We are very encouraged by the 10,000 plus Season Tickets we have sold to date and we look forward to welcoming our fans back to Loftus Road on the first day of the season against Bolton Wanderers on August 13.”
This is the second time this summer that Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore, or at least people acting on their behalf, have put fingers to keyboard and addressed the supporters at QPR. The first occasion was back in May when they responded to Amit Bhatia’s resignation and Ishan Saksena’s sacking and now we have this latest effort. Sadly the much loved pair at the top of our club never miss an opportunity, either in statements or interviews, to betray their lack of knowledge and understanding of football. Nor do they ever miss the chance to show just how much distain they have for the supporters and how little they seem to think we know about the sport. They’ve done so again in spades here.
Back in May we were told that the vastly increased ticket prices were in line with other London Premiership clubs. That, of course, is true but to return to a metaphor once used by our former chairman Bill Power we’re not talking about a cinema here. We can’t simply look at what Tottenham are charging and charge the same because we’re not showing the same product as Tottenham. At the cinema everybody is showing Pirates of the Caribbean, so if you own a cinema you just look at what the other cinemas are charging people to see that film and charge accordingly depending on your strategy. In the Premiership Tottenham are showing Rafael Van Der Vaat, Gareth Bale and Luka Modric while we’re facing up to the very real prospect of having to pick Fitz Hall, Patrick Agyemang and Hogan Ephraim for some of our games this season. They point to the high sales figures as justification, but we've seen before at Loftus Road that such rises poison the atmosphere and at those prices sales will collapse next summer and thereafter as the novelty of the Premiership wears off or we are relegated. There's no long term planning in their pricing. It’s this clear lack of understanding of the sport that shines through time and time again when Ecclestone and Briatore speak and it does so again this weekend.
It’s there for all to see from the first line of this latest effort. The news that Adel Taarabt is staying, if it turns out to be true, is absolutely fantastic. He was our best player by a country mile last season and voted the best in the Championship by his fellow professionals. In a summer when we’ve already signed Kieron Dyer and are apparently now seriously considering Danny Gabbidon as well the retention of the Championship’s best player from last season is undoubtedly a huge boost. Norwich have spent the thick end of £8m this summer on seven players and not a single one of them is as good as Taarabt.
Personally, for all of that, I was never that convinced about this proposed big move to Paris St Germain and said as much on the messageboard. Even on Friday when it seemed the deal was close I clung to Taarabt’s comments earlier this summer about not being crazy on the idea of playing in Ligue One, and the fact that Flavio Briatore was leading the negotiations meaning we were probably asking for three times what Taarabt is actually worth and wanted it all paid up front. Taarabt will not be bought by anybody in this country for the money we want for him until he has proven himself in the Premiership because no manager will take such a big risk on such a problem child. Had he gone to France he’d have been the show pony who failed at Spurs and then ran away to a piss poor league when given a second chance to show he could cut it in the Premiership. Not a good reputation to have.
However to say he is definitely staying shows a lack of understanding of the sport, and backs Briatore and Ecclestone into a corner. I’m not sure I believe the interest in Taarabt was really there at all, and if it was I don’t think he’s that fussed about going to play in France. But if it was and if he is then Taarabt could now try and force that move through. In modern day football it’s the players that hold all the power. We will eventually see it with Fabregas, we’ll see it with Modric, we’ll see it with Tevez – as much as the old ideal about leaving them to rot in the reserves is admirable it’s merely wishful thinking. If players want to go they will go, and if Taarabt really wants to go then he will go. Paris St Germain have said today they expect to resume negotiations over Taarabt on Monday. And what if somebody does come in with an outlandish offer for him? Then what? Even if every supporter recognised that Taarabt had made it impossible for him to stay, or that the transfer fee received is a good deal, that fact would remain that Briatore and Ecclestone said the player was definitely staying and then sold him. One can only hope that when they said Taarabt is “fully committed” to playing for QPR in the Premiership they have actually spoken to him and agreed that with him first otherwise they’re at risk of being made to look like liars.
Another problem our club has with the Taarabt situation is our official website is now damaged goods – a ‘toxic brand’ I believe is the modern day saying. Having admitted publicly during the Alejandro Faurlin case that the club used the official website to publish a “puff” piece to appease the fans, saying Faurlin had cost £3.5m when in actual fact it was less than a tenth of that, can we ever actually believe anything that’s published on their again? If they do sell Taarabt for £15m, and then tell us they sold him for £15m, then none of us will believe them. If the official website told me the sky was blue I’d want to pop outside and check for myself.
Do we believe them when they say Warnock would have had the Taarabt money to spend had he been sold, despite Warnock saying the exact opposite last week? That sounds like an easy thing to say now it’s apparently not happening to me – yes, of course I’d have given all signed up members of LFW a thousand pounds in cash had I won the lottery last night.
Time and again when reading the statement above, and listening to the lines coming out of Loftus Road in general, I find myself asking: ‘how stupid do they really think we are?’. As we read down: “Flavio Briatore outlined a four year plan to reach the Premier League, which was achieved.” Oh right so it was the plan all along to work our way through Luigi De Canio, Iain Dowie, Paulo Sousa, Jim Magilton, Paul Hart and Mick Harford was it? The only reason Flavio’s four year plan came to fruition was because Flavio buggered off for a bit when things went absolutely tits up and Amit Bhatia and Ishan Saksena appointed Neil Warnock and let him get on with it. If Flavio had run the club for the last four years himself we’d be looking forward to Hartlepool not Newcastle this season. Do they think we’ve forgotten all of that?
“We have backed Neil Warnock in bringing in his two top targets, Jay Bothroyd and Kieron Dyer.” Bothroyd? Perhaps. Kieron Dyer? Warnock’s top summer transfer target after 16 starts in four years at newly relegated West Ham? I very much doubt it don’t you? And if he was then why did it take until the end of July to get it sorted? Dyer has known he would be a free agent this summer for months and the season ended in May. Last summer such free agents were signed up immediately. Without wishing to be crude, top target my arse.
“Welsh international Danny Gabbidon has impressed the coach whilst on trial and we are aiming to add him, as well as at least one or two other players to our squad in the near future,” again, this is either mistaking us for being stupid or lacking understanding of the game or both. Would the other two players be Brian Murphy and Danny Webber by any chance? If they think these are signings that will make us competitive in the Premiership they’re sadly, sadly mistaken.
Hopefully what has actually happened here is that the purse strings have been tightened during the summer because Ecclestone and Briatore wanted and expected to sell the club in that time but having failed to do so they will now loosen them sufficiently to give Warnock a fighting chance of securing us as a Premiership club. Should DJ Campbell and Wayne Routledge be the other two players (costing a sum total of about £3m) then I may start to believe that is the case.
And then the really killer paragraph. Neil Warnock is our coach and we are working closely with him in a professional and confidential manner to try to achieve our aims and objectives. The coach's job is to coach the squad and identify players he believes will improve the squad. As a board, we deal with all the negotiations and we have been successful in completing deals for Bothroyd and Dyer so far. We are aware of some issues that have been raised in the press by the coach, but we have discussed these with him internally and he has agreed to be more reserved in terms of what he discusses in the future.
Ignore the irony of the statement urging a professional and confidential approach and then going on to issue an unprofessional and public rebuke of QPR’s most successful manager in years for a moment if you can. This, I believe, is what lies at the heart of this latest offering from our club. Criticism from fans and newspapers our owners can handle, because they’ve never cared what the QPR supporters think and some of the newspaper coverage is so badly written and wildly inaccurate that it’s hardly worth the paper it’s written on – count the inaccuracies in yesterday’s Independent article, a paper that carries Neil Warnock’s column and could therefore have checked the facts with him at the drop of a hat, and marvel at just how poor today’s effort from the Express is.
However over the past couple of weeks Neil Warnock has played a very clever game with our board. He is unsackable at the moment. Adored by the QPR supporters and seen throughout the game and the media as a miracle worker who triumphed in the face of the QPR farce where so many others had failed. Even Flavio Briatore cannot sack Warnock, at least until he’s suffered a bad run of results in the Premiership, and Warnock knows that. So he’s used the media to put a bit of pressure on the board, to say they’re not backing him, to say he’s got nothing to do with his best player being sold and he won’t see any of the money when he is. Paulo Sousa was sacked for less but the fans are on Warnock’s side, the press are on Warnock’s side, and so he’s got away with making Briatore and Ecclestone look terrible. That has clearly rankled with them and has forced action.
Hopefully it has led to a full and frank exchange of views in which Warnock has agreed to rein in his public criticism of the pair in exchange for a little bit more support in his squad building. Either that or Warnock has been told in no uncertain terms that if he doesn’t like the cards he’s been dealt he can resign. Whichever it is I still believe that Warnock is likely to be out of a job at Loftus Road sooner rather than later, probably when his grossly underequipped squad has lost its first few games, and then Flavio’s dream of an obscure Italian coaching players Briatore has used his connections to bring in can be rekindled.
It is massively concerning that they are now referring to Neil Warnock as “the coach” rather than the manager. Accuse me of looking for something that isn’t there if you like but the word “coach” is mentioned several times and this is exactly how the trouble started with Iain Dowie. Warnock has a clause in his contract entitling him to full control of players coming into the club and a full pay off upon departure of that is broken, which should prevent a repeat of the Dowie situation, but you’ll forgive me for not trusting Briatore as far as I can throw him on that issue.
The headline for this article was going to be ‘actions speak louder than words’, but instead I’m using that as my conclusion. It’s easy to say that Adel Taarabt will be staying and is committed to the club, it might be a good deal harder to actually make that a reality. It is certainly more difficult to secure a club of our size in the Premiership than to merely say you’re going to do so and for all the grand promises in this latest statement it will all count for nothing once Bolton set about us on day one. We will not survive this season if the highlights of our summer activity are Kieron Dyer and Danny Gabbidon and if the board thinks we will then I’m afraid a long winter lies ahead. A winter those two will probably spend mostly with the physio.
To be fair to the owners a statement was needed, but that’s only because things clearly aren’t going well at Loftus Road. You don’t see successful and well run clubs slinging out too many official statements like this. It’s now up to the board to make good what they’ve said and secure us as a Premiership team. As it stands, three weeks before the start of the season, they’re a million miles away from doing that.
Disagree? Argue the toss in the comment box below or follow @loftforwords on Twitter and chat to me there. Not between 3.30pm and 5.30pm today though please, I’ll be watching the latest nail going into the Hull FC 2011 season coffin then.